Obama's Age of Moral Equivalence

To be Barack Obama is to be, as he says, a person who can see all issues from all sides. ....The signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993... began the process of handing over large portions of the area reserved by the League of Nations for the creation of a Jewish National Home for the creation of a Palestinian equivalent. But Israel offered these same Palestinians a state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza as well as part of Jerusalem in 2000 and again in negotiations conducted by the government of Ehud Olmert just last year. So, the problem is not... the Israelis... Rather, it is, as Mahmoud Abbas said in Washington only a week ago, that the Palestinians aren't interested in negotiating with Israel.

Even more obnoxious is his comparison of the Palestinians' plight to that of African-Americans in the U.S. before the civil rights era. Israelis have not enslaved Palestinians. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians rests on the latter's unwillingness to come to terms with the former's existence. The plight of Palestinians in Gaza is terrible, but it is a direct result of their own decision to choose war over peace... Going to the Middle East while ostentatiously avoiding Israel and picking a fight with its leadership sends a message that will resonate throughout the Arab world. His signal that America is now an impartial broker rather than Israel’s ally can only encourage a Palestinian people that continue to reject peace.

Though he made a number of important points about fighting terror, religious tolerance and women’s rights and democracy, the speech was constructed and delivered as a series of moral equivalencies that undermine both the search for peace as well as the equally necessary drive to reform the Islamic world.blockquote>